Baig: The promise and pain of Windows Phone and Nokia

Jul. 17, 2014
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A Nokia Lumia 930 smartphone. / JOSH EDELSON AFP/Getty Images

by Edward C. Baig, USA TODAY

by Edward C. Baig, USA TODAY

NEW YORK - That major layoffs were coming to Microsoft had been hanging out there for days. Now, we get not only confirmation, but the gruesome details from CEO Satya Nadella: 18,000 jobs are to be wiped out over the next year.

The business necessities for this major restructuring have been well documented, and more than hinted at in an e-mail Nadella sent to the staff last week. The burden of this realigning of the workforce - softer language doesn't soften the blow for the people who will lose those jobs - mostly caves in on Nokia, the once-dominant Finnish phone maker that had fallen on tough times, and which Microsoft formally acquired in April.

Some 12,500 positions will be cut to address the "synergies and strategic alignment" of Nokia, Nadella said.

I'm mainly a consumer product guy and reviewer. When I think of Microsoft I still think of the powerhouse brands under Bill Gates that were, and are, recognizable on Main Street, brands whose origins date back to when Ronald Reagan still occupied the White House: MS-DOS (OK, that's now in the history books), Windows, Office, heck even Microsoft Mouse.

But Microsoft's phones - and really Microsoft's mobile efforts at large - never came close to achieving the status of these other brands. Sure, Microsoft had some modest success in the enterprise with Windows Mobile devices as they were then called (and if you want to go way back, Pocket PCs).

But they never had much stickiness there, and certainly never made much headway with consumers.

So here we are in an age in which Nadella recognizes as much as anyone the importance of mobile - not only among the commercial business organizations that remain a core strength for Microsoft, but among ordinary folks who look to Google's Android and Apple's iOS as the go-to platforms.

I happen to like the recent Nokia phones that I've seen, all of which run a version of Windows Phone. Microsoft is only now rolling out version 8.1 of the software with a promising voice search feature known as Cortana.

The first of the phones with the upgrade, the budget-priced Nokia Lumia 635, look like a real bargain. But Microsoft has a long way to go before Nokia and Windows Phone makes major progress in snatching meaningful market share from the competition, assuming that is even possible.

In the cold, hard realities of today's business world, such an effort starts with painful layoffs.